The Intrepid Lens & Shutter Project

So we reached out to a few friends we had in the lens design world and we got the ball rolling and after a year or so of designs, emails, a surpising amount maths, and taking test shot after test shot we got our first prototype back. The Intrepid Large format Lens its a 150mm with an incredible f4.5 which makes it quite a unique bit of kit 

As it is, it needs some tweaking and a bit of work, but there are a lot of things we love about it, the super wide aperture and the amazing colour rendition, and when stopped down to around f30 for black and white it has this amazing contrast.

It needs to be a bit sharper, especially at the edges, and that is what we will be working on with the design team over the next few months. But there is no doubt in the team's mind that this is already a beautiful lens and a lot of fun to use.

Now a large format lens is no good without a shutter, and large format shutters are no longer made, sure you can still find them easily enough second hand, but wouldn't it be great if there was a new source for them, which brings me to the second part of this huge project.

The Intrepid Shutter, now this was probably even more complicated to design than the lens and we have been on quite a journey with many, many different versions, all thought up by our resident electronic genius Dan who loves nothing more than an evening sending me a video of the latest thing he has come up with via WhatsApp.

After many prototypes, some more elegant than others, we settled on something simple, reliable and versatile. Compatible not only with our new lens, but with a huge range of large format lenses of different sizes. This shutter will be as useful to someone with a large collection of lenses as it is to someone just starting out.

It will be an electronic shutter, which has a lot of advantages over a mechanical one, in particular the ability to set the aperture digitally, which greatly increases compatibility. We have also come up with a clever way to make the shutter compatible with both Copal 0 and 1 lenses (but more on that in a few weeks).

This is all a huge project for us and we are sharing information about it a little earlier than we normally would, so expect everything you see over the next few months to look a little raw. We are doing this because we want and need feedback from the community as we finalise the design.

We plan to launch the lens and shutter properly on Kickstarter in August, so to keep up with all the developments, scroll down and join our mailing list. Thank you! Max